Recently, with the explosive growth in the number of Internet users, the way people use the Internet has become more sophisticated. It has become a common practice for users, for example, to buy products on Web pages. Under these circumstances, the B-to-C (Business-to-Consumer) market for electronic commerce conducted by businesses with respect to consumers has been growing sharply, and many companies have set out to run virtual malls.
In the Business-to-Consumer area, there are various uncomplicated Web-based applications. When using such Web-based applications, the user performs searches, fills in forms, enters input, and so forth through a Web-browser screen input on a client machine.
However, securities transactions, auctions, purchases of travel tickets, and so forth which involve complicated procedures may take longer than expected when the user experiences difficulty making entries on the Web-browser screen. If the user attempts to go to the next screen after long time lapse for entries like this, a message such as “Data Missing” or, for “The screen is no longer valid” may be displayed, meaning all the data entered up until then has been lost. This is because an object (Http session object) which stores client-specific information has become invalid due to a timeout on the application server which provides Web pages. Application servers are provided with this feature as standard.
According to conventional application models, such timeouts are managed only on the side of the application server. Consequently, the user repeats input operations and the like without realizing that a timeout has occurred and often feels frustrated at having wasted time on useless data entry. On the other hand, the company may lose valuable business opportunities. Thus there is a great demand for system improvements in order to win intensifying competition.